Mother’s Little Helper. Part 2

…continued..

To be fair, doctors and drug companies don’t deserve all the blame. The more liberated, educated, and empowered we’ve become the more aggressively we’ve demanded that extra boost to “get by.” Supply and demand go hand in hand. Today’s high-achieving young woman has no time for life. The feminist movement told us we could do anything the boys could do and off we went, rushing madly to keep up with our male competitors, more than willing to swallow whatever concoction necessary to get up earlier, strive harder, be more positively energetic, and forget how overwhelmed and disconcerted we really were.

Granted there are some women whose emotional and psychological health is such that they deserve serious medical attention and treatment. But for most of us, the physical and emotional tolls of the “daily grind” are simply not grounds for developing a chemical dependency.

And yet, the vicious cycle continues. As last year’s movie Requiem for a Dream so graphically illustrated, the extension of these “controlled” addictions is no more salutary than the heroine fiend’s daily injection. In her delusional effort to lose weight and appear on a game show, the film’s protagonist, a lonely widow named Sara Goldfarb, turns to an indifferent doctor, who, in turn, overlooks the true nature of her problems only to addict her to the bottles of uppers and downers meant to shrink her waistline but instead succeed in magnifying her depressed and manic state. While Goldfarb’s case is an extreme, the film does underscore the very gross neglect many women receive from their “health care provider.”

Will things change anytime soon? It’s unlikely. As my mother says, change will come if American women alter their lifestyles (“slow down and stop popping pills”) or doctors are made to realize (“through legislation or a really hard slap to the head”) that the patient does not exist to supply him or her with a large income. And given that our lives are becoming more cluttered and that recent reports show drug manufacturers increasing their clout on Capitol Hill, neither scenario appears on the horizon.

As Dowd ruefully concludes, it’s ironic how much things have stayed the same since the Rolling Stone’s classic paean to the horrors of post-modern domesticity was released some 30-odd years ago. Decades of feminist dogma have failed to properly address the full implications of women’s health, and by now it’s clear that much of the medical and pharmaceutical establishment would rather not go there. It’s up to us to say no to quick fixes and superfluous prescriptions. It’s up to us to realize that perfectionism can’t be purchased at the corner CVS.

After all, it’s our body, our selves, our responsibility.